


Heat of the Night

by Laelior



Series: Binary Star [2]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship, Sparring, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Wrex is a troll, gratuitous shirtlessness, like SO MUCH unresolved tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:02:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29611908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laelior/pseuds/Laelior
Summary: With the Normandy running hot, Kaidan finds it hard to sleep. Shepard can’t sleep, either, and challenges Kaidan to a friendly sparring match.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard
Series: Binary Star [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2196258
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Heat of the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you SO MUCH to Kittyhawk for helping me out with this fic and coming up with the perfect title.

It was too hot to sleep.

Kaidan gave up after a few hours of tossing and turning in his increasingly uncomfortable sleeping pod. He pushed the pod open and stepped out, finding little relief in the rush of hot, humid air that washed over him from outside of the pod. The deck, at least, was cool against his bare feet. He wiped away the trickle of sweat that formed on his brow, surveying the other pods. It was night shift, so they were all occupied. Emerson and both of the Dravens stirred a little in their pods, but the rest of the crew somehow managed to be sleeping soundly despite the heat. How they did it was utterly beyond him.

Kaidan shrugged it off and padded silently over to the galley to grab some water. The _Normandy_ had been running in stealth mode for eight hours, two of them actively running the engines before cutting power and letting their ballistic trajectory take care of the rest. The lithium heat sinks had to be near their limit by now, warming up the ship past the threshold he considered comfortable.

He nodded at Tanaka, a night shift crewman who sat at the mess table eating what looked like a bowl of cold tomato soup while browsing through some technical specs on a datapad.

“Can’t sleep, LT?” the corporal asked, looking up from the datapad.

Kaidan shook his head. “How’s the night shift going?”

“Quiet. Pressly is having us run regular environmental checks, but that’s about it.” Tanaka shrugged.

“Quiet’s better than the alternative. Did he say how long until we get to Agebinium?” The sooner they reached their destination, the sooner they could turn off the stealth drive and vent heat. 

“Another four or five hours, sir. Sorry,” Tanaka added with an apologetic smile when Kaidan grimaced. 

“Not your fault, Corporal. Enjoy your soup,” Kaidan said. His stomach made a sudden pained sound, forcing a chuckle out of him. “Actually, soup sounds pretty good. There any left?”

“Sorry, LT. This was the last bowl.” Tanaka lifted up the bowl and drank the rest of the soup straight from it with a loud slurp. Kaidan bit back a laugh at the crewman’s oddly possessive behavior. He was an odd one. Always volunteering for the night shift, always telling jokes that didn’t seem to have a punchline, having a strange relationship with his favorite foods. But Kaidan rather liked him. For all his quirks, he was an extremely competent junior combat engineer.

“Too late now, anyway. I’m sure there’s an energy bar or something around.” Kaidan waved the corporal off. But, as he opened the cabinet where they were usually stored, the only thing he found was an empty cardboard box. He went over to his workstation, where he usually kept an emergency snack or two of his favorite peanut butter and dark chocolate energy bars, but that was empty, too. That was odd. He could have sworn he’d seen them there just a few hours ago.

While he was there, he glanced over at the door to Shepard’s cabin. No lights glowed softly through the little gap between the door and the floor, and there were no muffled sounds of datapads clattering on her desk or feet pacing the deck. She must have turned in early. It was probably for the best. She hadn’t seemed too interested in talking after the Terra Nova debrief the other day.

_You’re out of line, Lieutenant. Dismissed._

Kaidan made his way back to the galley.

“Hey, LT, if you’re still looking for a snack, I know we took on some more supplies the last time we were on the Citadel,” Tanaka offered helpfully. “There’s some crates down on the cargo deck that haven’t been unloaded.”

“Thanks for the tip, corporal.” 

Tanaka offered him a casual salute, then went back to the specs on his datapad. 

The elevator seemed to take longer than usual to make its descent from the crew deck to the cargo hold. Or maybe it was just discomfort and impatience that stretched the time out, turned seconds into minute and minutes into hours. Finally, the lift came to a close and the doors slid open. Surprisingly, the air seemed cooler. Not by much, just enough to give him a small amount of relief. He took it for the small blessing it was. 

As he made his way to the back of the cargo hold, he heard a sharp, repetitive _thud_ sound coming from the other side of the otherwise quiet deck, somewhere off behind the Mako. The sound stopped, then started up again. Kaidan walked quietly over to its source. It seemed too rhythmic to be some sort of rodent, but also too irregular to be a mechanical issue. A crewman, maybe? He knew the night shift rotation, knew that no one should be working down here this time of night.

He heard huffing noises as he got closer, like someone exhaling with each _thud_ . The sounds of heavy physical exertion, and he spotted some movement behind the Mako. Coming around the corner past the vehicle, he half-expected to find one of the crewmen playing around. Or two, in which case he wasn’t sure he wanted to see what was going on. _At this time of night? In this heat?_

Instead, it was Shepard in her blue BDUs and a loose black T-shirt. She bounced forward on the balls of her bare feet, lunging at a foam pillow taped to a storage crate with a series of quick jabs. _Thud, thud thud_ , exhaling sharply and letting her hips snap forward as each blow connected with the pillow. She’d wrapped her knuckles with some sort of white cloth that was starting to unravel. When she bounced back to her starting position, she took a moment to re-wrap her hands, then moved back in for another series of blows. She never stopped moving for long, keeping light on her feet and dancing around her target each time she lunged in for another round. Somehow she made the hard-and-fast training look graceful. Kaidan turned away, leaving her to exercise in privacy.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” She said suddenly. Kaidan froze in place, his feet suddenly refusing the move except to turn back to face her.

“Too warm. I’m surprised anyone can sleep when the ship’s like this,” he said cautiously, probing her mood. She’d been positively icy at the end of their last conversation and he’d been sure she didn’t want to talk again. But now she was back to her more usual self, judging by the relaxed set of her shoulders and the slight smile she wore. 

“Maybe it’s a biotic thing. Faster metabolism and all that, and we’re the only ones on board.” She reached up to wipe away the sweat gathering on her forehead, then rolled up her sleeves to sit up further on her shoulders. 

“That...actually makes a lot of sense.” As if reacting to the word ‘metabolism,’ his stomach growled loudly, reminding him why he’d come down here to begin with.

Shepard chuckled. “Need to feed the beast, Kaidan?”

“Just hunting down the rumors that there might be some snacks here, since the ones I keep up top are gone.” So he was back to being ‘Kaidan’ again instead of ‘Lieutenant.’ That was a good sign. Probably.

“Someone else got all the peanut butter and chocolate energy bars, huh?” She raised an eyebrow.

Kaidan smoothed down his surprise that she remembered his preferred snack. “Tanaka said there might be a few down here.”

“You might check that crate over there.” She nodded her head at one next to her impromptu punching bag. Sure enough, when he opened it he saw some familiar packaging. Not quite his favorite flavor, but he wasn’t too picky. He tore the wrapper open and dug in without hesitation. 

Shepard plopped down on a nearby crate, unwrapping the white, sweat-stained band from her knuckles.

“Does Chakwas know you raided her medical tape supply?” He asked between bites, even though he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

“What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her. It’s being put to good use, anyway.” She grinned at him. In the dim, night-mode lights, her eyes sparkled at him mischievously. “You train much hand-to-hand, Kaidan?”

“Me? No, not since my last field cert.” He finished the energy bar and stowed the wrapper in his pocket, then wiped his hands down on his BDUs to get the last crumbs off.

“Normally I’d get Williams in the ring for a few rounds, but she’s hit the bunk for the night.” She glanced over at him, brushing a sweaty lock of hair that had escaped from its bun away from her face. “What about you. You’re up anyway. How about going a few rounds?”

A polite refusal sat on the tip of his tongue. Sparring was not something he enjoyed, and sparring with his commanding officer was probably a bad idea, even if she’d suggested it. But to his own surprise, he found the words, “Sure, why not?” tumbling from his mouth. 

She grinned at him then, and Kaidan’s heart beat a little faster at how her eyes lit up. She hopped up to move four of the crates, forming a slightly irregular square with him at the center of it.

“That’ll do for a sparring ring. You let me know what you’re comfortable with, if there’s any moves or targets you want off the table.” She eyed him seriously while re-wrapping the medical tape around her knuckles. 

“Nothing below the belt, ma’am,” he said after thinking about it for a moment. She nodded, rolled her shoulders twice, then started circling him. Kaidan curled both hands into fists and raised them to a guard position in front of his chin then started moving opposite her.

“One of these days, you might consider calling me ‘Beth’ when we’re off duty.”

Kaidan paused. They’d talked, flirted, danced around the idea of something between them in much the same way they were circling each other now. Like two stars in tenuous orbit around one another. But then sometimes she was cold and business-like with him, pushing him out of her orbit when he tried to get close, like after Terra Nova. The constant flipping, the hot-and-cold dynamic left him guessing what her real intentions were. So for now, “Shepard” and “ma’am” seemed safer.

“I’ll consider it,” he said cautiously. Her grin slipped a little, dimmed a little from what looked suspiciously like disappointment. Kaidan frowned, then decided to steer away from what looked an awful lot like a minefield. “I imagine you must have trained pretty extensively.”

The piercing look she gave him indicated she clearly knew he was deliberately changing the subject, but went along with it anyway. “At N-school, we worked unarmed combat drills almost every day, in almost every condition imaginable. Heat, rain, snow, high-G. Hell, even null-G a few times.” She grinned again. “You learn real quick that Newton’s First and Third laws don’t mess around in that environment.”

Kaidan’s stomach clenched in sympathy for the unlucky N-school candidates. 

“You’re looking a little green, there, Kaidan. I take it you didn’t do much null-G?”

“Not if I could help it,” he chuckled.

“Shame,” she said with a shake of her head. “There’s nothing quite like trying not to vomit on your training partner after they kick you in the solar plexus.”

Kaidan couldn’t couldn’t help but wince. “I’ll, uh, keep that in mind, ma’am.” 

She made no move to attack him, just continued to circle. Waiting for him to make the first move, he realized. So he obliged her. He closed the distance between them with a cautious jab aimed at her guard, then a follow-up straight punch higher up. She raised her arms to block, and he tried with another jab that she almost lazily blocked. He stepped back to reassess. 

When he’d been a kid, there’d been a barn cat named Cleo at his parents’ orchard. She had been a mouser, useful for keeping the rodents in check during harvest season. Half-feral, she’d occasionally consented to allow Kaidan pet her, but only on her terms and only when she felt safe. One time she’d brought him a live mouse. She’d laid the furry, squirmy creature down at his feet and looked at him expectantly. He’d jumped away from the mouse, the primal part of his brain recoiling in disgust from it. Cleo, seemingly unbothered by his rejection of her gift, had simply played with the mouse. She’d let it get away, then bring her paw down on it with her lightning-fast reflexes and drag it back toward her. 

Facing off against Shepard across the makeshift sparring ring, Kaidan was forcibly reminded of Cleo, repeatedly inviting the mouse to try and escape only to remind it that she was in charge until the mouse simply gave up from sheer exhaustion. Shepard’s lazy half-grin as she eyed him back only reinforced the parallel.

He swallowed hard, wondering why he’d let himself get talked into this. She was toying with him. Only instead of letting him think he could escape, she allowed him to think he had a chance to get past her defenses only to strike past his own and land a blow on him. 

That lazy, playful look was familiar by now, though. He’d seen it often enough during their frequent skirmishes with pirates and other Terminus outlaws. The one time he’d seen it slip, the only time he’d seen her truly enraged in a fight—

She moved up past his left side and lightly tapped his ribs before he could even think to block her.

“A little slow there, Alenko. Getting tired already?” She stepped back and cocked her head at him.

“Sorry, ma’am. Guess my head wasn’t in the game.” He shook his head and repositioned his guard, rocking back and forth of the balls of his feet to get back into the spirit of the match. 

“Something’s clearly on your mind, Kaidan. Speak freely.”

He moved in with a quick jab that she slapped out of the way, followed by a hook punch that she weaved under, coming back up with an uppercut that he shut down just before it touched his shirt. 

“Terra Nova,” he said when they moved apart to circle one another again.

“Something about the mission bothering you?” She stepped in and Kaidan braced himself, but then she moved back. A feint to test his defenses, then.

“I was thinking about Balak,” he said, carefully trying to navigate into a potentially volatile subject.

“Balak? The batarian terrorist?” Her grin took on a frozen quality. “What about him?”

“It was...I hope you don’t mind me saying this, ma’am, but you looked like you wanted to murder him.”

“I told you to speak freely, didn’t I?”

It didn’t escape his notice that she sidestepped his main comment. She lunged at him again, sliding up beside him with a rolling backhand to his temple that he blocked, and a fast jab at his side with her knuckles that he didn’t. Instead of pulling back, her hand lingered there for a moment, just barely touching him. He was suddenly very aware of how close they were, how her forehead shone with sweat, how much heat she gave off. He licked his lips. This was either an opportunity to strike, or it was a trap. But before he could make up his mind which it was, she moved away even as the heat coming off of her stayed with him.

They continued to move in circles around each other in tense silence until she finally broke it.

“I wanted to do more than murder him,” she said at last. “I wanted to Warp him into the ground until he was a fine paste, gather the paste into a little bowl, then find some varren to feed him to. But that might have been too cruel to the varren.”

The frank admission momentarily shocked him. It shouldn’t have. He’d been there, had seen the look of pure and utter hatred on her face when she’d held Balak at gunpoint. He’d been afraid she would forget about the hostages and end him right in that moment. That sort of incandescent fury didn’t come from nowhere. It had seemed deeply personal. But hearing her say it aloud was another thing entirely.

“So why didn’t you?”

“You mean, beside the hostages?”

“Even if you didn’t let him go, if you thought it was worth the trade-off for the hostages, you could have detained him and turned him over the Alliance to stand trial.”

“Balak deserves to die for what he’s done. If I ever see him again, I _will_ kill him,” she said with such an icy coldness that Kaidan momentarily forgot about the heat on the ship. “But Bowman and the hostages deserved to live more than he deserved to die. Bowman’s brother—” She practically spat on the deck. He recalled the fate of Aaron Bowman, executed to send his sister a message. For just a moment, that look of rage and disgust he remembered from the asteroid flashed across Shepard’s face, twisting her features up in a snarl.

Then she shook her head and lunged forward with another combo. He was starting to see a pattern to them: move in close, aim a blow at his head to force him to block, then attack his exposed ribs when he did so. He easily blocked the first blow, then brought down his elbow on her other arm to block the next set of incoming punches. She moved away with the oddest little smile on her face, like she was pleased with his catching on to her tactic. 

“There was another reason, of course.”

“What was that?” he asked warily.

“I asked myself, ‘What would Kaidan do?’” She gave him a smile, one with an almost saccharine-like sweetness, then came in with another combo while he was off-balance from her comment. Kaidan almost absently blocked the first two punches aimed at his head and side, but the third got through. He felt a light tap on his ribs as she exerted expert control on the blow. “What can I say? The angel on my shoulder kinda sounds like you these days.”

“Who does the devil on your other shoulder sound like?” he asked, wondering if she was going to bite his head off for the light flirting this time.

Thankfully, she didn’t. Instead, the grin she offered him in response cranked the temperature in the room up about 5 degrees warmer than it already was. His shirt suddenly felt unbearably warm. He grabbed the hem of it and quickly pulled it over his head, tossing it just outside the ring where it landed with a wet _plop_. Her eyes tracked the shirt’s arc, then went back to him. Her expression didn’t change, but there was a sudden intensity in her eyes. Once again he thought of Cleo the barn cat toying with her mouse.

Kaidan moved in again with a series of blows. He was shocked when one of them made it through her guard, but he pulled it at the last second before it could land on her ribs. She snorted, countering with a strike at his solar plexus that he blocked. 

He pressed his advantage followed up with a hook. She ducked under it, grabbed his wrist, and the next thing he knew she had control of his shoulder and forced him to his knees. She pinned his arm against her chest at an angle that was just shy of uncomfortable. He put one hand down on the deck to keep himself from falling over.

“I know you’re holding back, Alenko,” she said in a low voice just next to his ear. His mind raced with all the possible interpretations of that statement, eventually choosing to go with the more obvious and immediate one.

“So are you, ma’am.”

“So I am,” she agreed, then let his arm go and helped him back to his feet. “I’m pulling my punches, but you’re not even really trying to hit me. You go after my guard and you hesitate to take advantage of openings.” Her hair was starting to come loose from its bun. After trying unsuccessfully to rake it out of her face, she simply pulled the hair tie off and tried to coil her hair up again, but the elastic tie broke. She tossed off to the side with a disgusted noise and let the long, dark tresses drape down across her shoulders in sweat-dampened waves. Kaidan swallowed hard and tried not to stare. 

“I just don’t want to….” _Hurt you_ , were the words he almost said before he stopped himself, _scare you_. For a moment, just a small fraction of a second, he saw another face superimposed on hers. One he’d last seen fifteen years ago, that looked at him in cold terror. He blinked, and it was gone, chased away with the simple discipline of a deep breath. Now it was just Shepard looking at him from across the ring.

“Kaidan,” she said, suddenly dropping the cockiness, the bravado she wore as a mask in a fight, and let her hands fall from their on-guard position. There was something very different in the way she looked at him, a certain solemn understanding. This was no longer the game of cat-and-mouse she’d been leading him on. “I understand how your experiences helped shape you. And I respect it. I’m not trying to push your boundaries here. All I’m saying is that I’m not fragile, and I can certainly handle a punch or two.”

“It’s not you. I know you’re tough, ma’am.” He swallowed hard again.

“Ah. The old, ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ Not the first time I’ve heard it.” She moved in at him again before he could respond.

This time he allowed her inside his defenses, allowed her to tap his ribs, and then gently grabbed her wrist. He hinged in closer and swung her around, using her own momentum against her and his other hand to guide her fall to the floor. He planted his knees on either side of her hips and pulled her still-trapped wrist close to his chest, locking it by applying pressure to the back of it with his thumb. 

“Guess you did pay attention during your hand-to-hand drills, after all.” She smirked up at him, seemingly unbothered by the position he had her in. 

“Occasionally,” he said modestly. An answering grin to hers formed on his face as he kept her pinned there. A sensation not unlike a buzzing electric current passed through his skin where her arm pressed against his bare chest. It almost reminded him of a mass effect field.

“You forgot one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“When you have an opponent pinned, it’s better to control her hips, not her arms.”

Suddenly her hand slipped from his sweat-slickened grasp and the world turned upside down as she wrapped her legs around his waist and flipped him over. Once she was on top, she sat on his stomach and trapped his chest firmly between her knees. She grabbed both of his hands before he could react and pinned them down against the deck. Her hair fell forward, just brushing against his chest.

Kaidan pressed his lips together and considered his options. He could easily break out of her grasp with a little biotic assistance. Shepard was strong for an L3. But he was stronger. All it would take was a small mass effect field around her arms and then he’d be back in control with her beneath him. Heat shot through him that had nothing to do with the ship’s stealth drive.

He tried to banish the thought from his mind but it stubbornly persisted. Trying to dislodge her by bucking his hips only made it worse. She was right: pinning only worked if you controlled the other person’s hips. 

She loomed over him, puffing her chest out in her victory which only served to heighten his discomfort in certain ways as her hips settled more firmly over him. “I could give you some tips to up your grappling game, if you want.”

He probably would have said yes to anything just then, under this form of torture that had to be banned by some intergalactic treaty or other. His heart thudded loudly in his chest, so loud he was surprised she couldn’t hear it.

“Shepard….” His voice came out in a low rasp that sounded strained even to him.

His reprieve came in the form of a low, rumbly throat clearing itself. Wrex stood over them, arms folded over his chest and one booted foot tapping impatiently on the deck. 

“Wrex,” Shepard said casually, letting go of Kaidan’s hands but not moving to get up off of him.

“Shepard,” the krogan replied. A sneer formed on his reptilian lips. “You humans and your….” His eyes flicked between the two of them, taking in Shepard’s unbound hair and Kaidan’s shirtless state. “Sparring rituals,” he finished with a grunt. “It’s the middle of the damned night.”

“Sorry, Wrex, I’ll try to be quieter next time.” Shepard grinned impishly. Kaidan just covered his face with his newly freed hands and swallowed back a groan. Wrex was the worst gossip. Even worse than Joker in some ways. This was going to be all over the ship by morning. No one would believe it had just been a friendly sparring match. He wasn’t even sure if _he_ believed it at this point.

“Humans,” Wrex said disgustedly. 

Kaidan turned away from the krogran to hide the sudden flush in his cheeks. From his vantage point on the floor, peering between his fingers, he caught a glimpse of something shiny lodged between two crates. 

“If you ever want a _real_ challenge in the ring, some real battle, Shepard, you know where to find me,” Wrex said before walking away with another shake of his head.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Wrex.” When the krogan was gone, she rolled off of him and collapsed in silent laughter next to him. Kaidan found himself breathing out a laugh, too. 

“This is going to be fun tomorrow,” he said, already not looking forward to the damage control he was going to have to do. 

“Wrex is the _worst_ gossip,” she agreed, in an eerie echo of his own earlier thoughts. She sat up, tucking her legs under her. Kaidan stayed where he was, finding the coolness of the deck and gentle _thrum_ of the engine’s vibrations soothing. “Kaidan….” Her expression turned thoughtful. She chewed on her lower lip, suddenly not so confident anymore.

Kaidan looked away, not in the mood to get in another argument. Not when being around her felt relaxing and everything else was uncomfortably warm. It was in the back of his mind that they _should_ talk, should clear the air between them, just not now. 

Once again, a flash of silvery light caught his eye between the crates. He rolled over and crawled to the crates, plucking a piece of silvery plastic from between them. It was a food wrapper, one with familiar brown-and-tan stripes across it. He turned around and waved it at her. Her eyes widened and a little guilty smile formed on her lips.

“Shepard, _is this one of my energy bars_?”

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me on [tumblr](http://laelior.tumblr.com).


End file.
